Adventures in music: Creating & Playing a totally new (and better) musical instrument: the jammer.

Feb 07, 2013

Piano Marvel is better than it looks

I’ve long needed decent piano course, and recently read a post suggesting that Piano Marvel should be checked out. Bingo! Hidden in a quiet package; a somewhat drab "trophy case" is real keyboard learning prize. With this tool, a huge barrier to learning an alternate instrument is gone.

Piano Marvel is a quite decent set of courseware. Its key feature is that it is quite supportive musically, with a good "backing track" (music that plays in the background to give you timing and pitch information), it is also very practice, rather than lecture-focused, with plenty of good lessons. It costs $15 a month, with the first month free. The price is, IMO, reasonable, as it’s as good as a decent piano teacher, in some ways.

Structure

As you can see from the picture, it has 6 "levels", each with 5 "sections". Each section is composed of a set of 20-or-so "lessons", It has two trophy cases, "Method" and "Technique", giving about 1200 lessons in total.

A "lesson" is actually more of an exercise, with each lesson/excercise targeted at a musical skill or two. The lessons get longer as you progress and the complexity ramps up rapidly. As you can see, the first level I managed to get nearly 100% (this is a testament to two years of practicing other ways; I won't do nearly so well on the next levels). The award levels are:

nothing - the Award spot shows the outline of an award in the case

“OK” - at least about 80% of notes right, in all exercises in the Section

Note: some ot the details above might be a bit off: I could not find a Piano Marvel overview section.

Good points

It's pretty good at keeping you coming back to do a lesson. After each lesson is completed: it shows you your score, shows you what you missed and compares you to your previous high score. It's thus easy to be challenged; think "if I just fix that mistake I'll push my peak score up /get a trophy", and repeat a lesson until one gets it. You are encouraged as well, by the visual "trophy case" to go back and have a whack at fixing up the few lessons that are keeping you from that gold piano. I, for example, am mildly bugged by the missing gold piano in level one and plan to fix it soon.

Some of the lessons, like the flash note reader are pretty quirky and take a while to get up to speed.Typically a 1st-level section took me 2-3 hours solid hours of concentration to complete to the gold-piano stage.

Crucially, it meshes well with midi in general and my software in particular: I have my jammer keyboards plugged in most of the time, so just have to fire up my keyboard integrator software (Reaper will probably work instead), and start PM, tell it to read the right input instrument, and go. This takes under a minute to start practicing.

It covers rhythm, chords, notes, scales, notation, sight-reading and theory. Further (and this is where I am weakest) it teaches left-right co-ordination well and has good ear-training drills.

With each section, it ratchets up the level with just enough repetition to really ingrain the learning. I particularly like the feature that allows one to ratchet the speed from 30 bpm to 240 (!) bpm.

It also has piles of pieces that you can use the tool to learn. So you can learn a real song to show off to your friends. Myself, I've got my eyes on "Bumble Boogie" - one day ... :) .

Could be improved ...

Now for the things I didn’t like. First, it does not spell out well how to use the product - what level is needed to get a reward level, how to use it, etc - you know, the basics.

Second, it appears kind of drab, makes poor use of screen real-estate. Because of the drabness, I initially thought it was going to be a boring set of drills. I would prefer to see all of the lessons in a section rather than the first 12 and have to scroll down to see the rest.

Also it does not give much of a clue as to how fast one is likely to progress, or hint as to what a given course level means in terms of skill advancement.

It's kind of weird that the Techniques award case is hidden behind the other case. What the heck? When am I supposed to go for the Techniques awards? Need I bother with them?

It would be nice to see at a glance what sections you've started on, even if there are no awards yet.

Alternatives

However, for comparison, I used tried eMedia's Piano and Keyboard Method, before graduating to Rock Band 3. eMedia only has 300 unexciting lessons (exercises) and 100 songs and got to be a slog.

Rock Band is often a hoot, but there are things it just does not teach, it is a pain to learn each song, and it can instill bad habits.

Conclusion

So I recommend you give Piano Marvel a try. If you have a sonome like the Axis-49 or 64, I’d especially like find out how it is for you.

Comments

I think I would love Piano Marvel if it ever worked consistently. I can't even get two days back to back where something doesn't work for a while and then stop working for no reason, requiring my stopping to report the issue, restart the program or the entire computer. It's just too frustrating, and now I'm looking for a new program.

My experience with Piano Marvel has been really good. They are always coming out with new updates and new features. This post is already quite outdated. If you haven't tried Piano Marvel, or if it's been a while I think you would be pleasantly surprised at what it has become. I think another key thing that makes Piano Marvel really great is that it works for virtually every ability level. There are 18 levels of music in their library http://www.pianomarvel.com/music-library so virtually anyone from a beginner to a pro can use Piano Marvel to improve their skills.

I have tried other Piano Software programs out there but Piano Marvel has them all beat.

My big problem with Piano Marvel, that nobody seems to have mentioned, is that is does not measure the time you hold a note, so when its teaching you note duration it makes no difference how long you play the note you still get a 100% score (as long as you play the right note at right time) - so you can play a whole note as an eighth note if you like it makes no difference. Which I find pretty poor especially when its meant to be teaching you what a whole note(or whatever) is.

RE: Playground Sessionshttp://www.playgroundsessions.com/
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at the web site.
I was limited in what I could see: too bad the pictures aren't click-able so that they can be seen in detail. The demo videos were brief and flashy, so I didn't get much of a feel for how it worked. but it is similar to Piano Marvel and Musiah in presentation and feedback.

Observations:
- It has an instant visual feedback. I don't see this being an advantage; I think it would distract from playing by ear.
- Instead of a free month's tryout, one has to pay for the product, try it out and if unsatisfied, request a refund.
- The song selection was pretty scant, and you have to pay the same price for public domain songs like The Entertainer. Some payment is not unreasonable, as someone has to arrange the piece and set it up for the program, but full price?
- In Piano Marvel the songs you purchase (and some are free) have considerable value added - they have been sliced and diced so that you can learn a piece in tiny sections and build up the piece from the ground up. This technique (which PM recommends), I've found, is considerably faster than the "learn it all at once" method.

I used PianoMarvel for 14 months. I enjoyed the progress tracking and instant feedback. The content was also good (except it is mostly building up towards classical piano playing skills).
What I hated: quite often the connection to the server failed, though my normal internet was working fine. This is not acceptable for a subscription based online software product. (They are using Amazon servers and tried to support, but success was so far limited.)

I'm 74 years young. As a kid I played accordion for several years then quit. The left hand on the accordion just plays a 4 note chord support for the treble clef and for years growing up I wondered what it would be like to have both hands playing separate music.

About a year ago I bought a keyboard and signed up for Piano Marvel and after 6 months was reading both the treble and bass clefs and got to experience each hand "doing it's own thing". I really enjoyed that experience - it felt like my brain divided into three parts: 1 for the left hand, 1 for the right hand and another part reading the music and running the show.

I have an engineering background so I really enjoyed the structure and the progressive build of Piano Marvel. Also, the Technique section challenges you to apply what you just learned in the Method section.

I had also tried Musiah and would encourage others to check it out too but I think it's Australian and I missed a few things due to the dialect and also at my age I really couldn't appreciate the character scenario as much as younger folks might.

But if/when any youngsters in my family show an interest in learning an instrument I will recommend they check both Piano Marvel and Musiah out; they're both excellent so it's a matter of personal preference.

I'm using it to learn new songs, simply by loading midi files. It also tracks your progress with quite detailed information (how many notes you missed, did you press during the whole duration, etc..), and it can also load very complex midi files and you can then choose what instrument(s) you want to play. And it can even convert visually the midi to a classic sheet!

Thus it's also very easy to make your own training sheet since you just have to split the notes on different midi channels to have them displayed in different colors and tracked differently by the program (since you can train only left hand or only right hand or both).